Dear future kid(s)

Posted by Sushi Suzuki on July 9th, 2012

I have no idea if you exist or not, and if so, how many of you there are. I just wanted to write this post in the off chance that you do exist and find this blog, which you most likely will as nothing on the internet disappears anymore.

See, once upon a time, almost no one used the internet. People actually kept journals on paper, not using computers but writing long prose with their hands. These journals of course never went online and was often left in a dusty box in the closet. The adolescent dramas of my parents were secure from their kids, but as my generation became empowered by the internet and more open, I fear that your generation is going to know a lot more about your parents than we were ever able to.

Now I’m sure many of my friends scrambled to get their digital traces wiped as their kids became cognizant, but as I write this, that is not my intent. My guess is that this kind of past disclosure will become the norm and that there are at least few politicians who endured mini-scandals from their teenage Facebook musings and blogs posts (is Facebook still cool?).

By the time you are reading this, I’ve probably written over a thousand blog posts and tens of thousands of tweets, so it’s going to take sometime to consume all of them. There are definitely posts that I think are silly and immature now, especially from the early days of my blogging, which probably seem even sillier and more immature from the future.

Don’t judge me too harshly for what you’ve found on what I’ve done and written in my past. If current trends continue, many things from the past will inevitably look ridiculous. That’s what we think of tight fitting jeans and mullets today; maybe they are fashionable again in the future?

From 2012, I can’t help it but wonder what kind of world you are living in now. Are there automated cars? Are you reading this on a screen or something more futuristic? Do you have robotic help in your home? Did we reach, or are we close to reaching the singularity? Did we finally solve the global warming problem? The challenges of your days are probably vastly different from the ones of today. Fret not. In every age, there are always people who think the world is going to end, and they are always wrong. The same, however, could be said about utopias as well.

The person who is your dad is probably a very different person from the one who is writing this blogpost. Hopefully I am a better dad than I am a writer today, come say hi when you get this letter.